Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border

by Gillian Roberts (Editor), David Stirrup (Editor)

Overview

The essays collected in Parallel Encounters offer close analysis of an array of cultural representations of the Canada-US border, in both site-specificity and in the ways in which they reveal and conceal cultural similarities and differences. Contributors focus on a range of regional sites along the border and examine a rich variety of expressive forms, including poetry, fiction, drama, visual art, television, and cinema produced on both sides of the 49th parallel.

The field of border studies has hitherto neglected the Canada-US border as a site of cultural interest, tending to examine only its role in transnational policy, economic cycles, and legal and political frameworks. Border studies has long been rooted in the US-Mexico divide; shifting the locus of that discussion north to the 49th parallel, the contributors ask what added complications a site-specific analysis of culture at the Canada-US border can bring to the conversation. In so doing, this collection responds to the demands of Hemispheric American Studies to broaden considerations of the significance of American culture to the Americas as a whole-bringing Canadian Studies into dialogue with the dominantly US-centric critical theory in questions of citizenship, globalization, Indigenous mobilization, hemispheric exchange, and transnationalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781554589845
Publisher:	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date:	12/06/2013
Series:	Cultural Studies , #13
Pages:	354
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Gillian Roberts is a lecturer in North American Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is co-investigator of the Leverhulme Trust–funded Culture and the Canada–US Border international research network. She recently completed a monograph on cultural representations of the Canada–US border.

David Stirrup is a senior lecturer in American literature at the University of Kent. He is the principal investigator of the Leverhulme Trust–funded Culture and the Canada–US Border international research network.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

1 Introduction: Culture at the 49th Parallel: Nationalism, Indigeneity, and the Hemispheric Gillian Roberts David Stirrup 1

Popular Culture and/at the Border

2 Queer(y)ing Fur: Reading Fashion Television's Border Crossings Jennifer Andrews 27

3 Meanings of Health as Cultural Identity and Ideology Across the Canada-US Border Jan Clarke 47

4 Television, Nation, and National Security: The CBC's The Border Sarah A. Matheson 61

5 "Normalizing Relations": The Canada/Cuban Imaginary on the Fringe of Border Discourse Joanne C. Elvy Luis René Fernández Tabío 79

6 How, Exactly, Does the Beaver Bite Back? The Case of Canadian Students Viewing Paul Haggis's Crash Lee Easton Kelly Hewson 91

Indigenous Cultures and North American Borders

7 Discursive Positioning: A Comparative Study of Postcolonialism in Native Studies Across the US-Canada Border Maggie Ann Bowers 111

8 Strategic Parallels: Invoking the Border in Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water and Drew Hayden Taylor's In a World Created by a Drunken God Gillian Roberts 127

9 Waste-full Crossings in Thomas King's Truth & Bright Water Catherine Bates 145

10 Bridging the Third Bank: Indigeneity and Installation Art at the Canada-US Border David Stirrup 163

11 Cross-Border Identifications and Dislocations: Visual Art and the Construction of Identity in North America Sarah E.K. Smith 187

12 Conversations That Never Happened: The Writing and Activism of Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Campbell, and Howard Adams Zalfa Feghali 207

Theorizing the Border: Literature, Performance, Translation

13 "Some Borders Are More Easily Crossed Than Others": Negotiating Guillermo Verdecchia's Fronteras Americanas Maureen Kincaid Speller 225

14 Discounting Slavery: The Currency Wars, Minstrelsy, and "The White Nigger" in Thomas Chandler Haliburton's The Clockmaker Jade Ferguson 243

15 Detained at Customs: Jane Rule, Censorship, and the Politics of Crossing the Canada-US Border Susan Billingham 261

16 Strangers in Strange Lands: Cultural Translation in Gaétan Soucy's Vaudeville! Jeffrey Orr 279

17 Bodies of Information: Cross-Border Poetics in the Twenty-First Century Nasser Hussain 293

18 Bordering on Borders: Dream, Memory, and Allegories of Writing Lynette Hunter 311

Notes on Contributors 335

Index 339

Editorial Reviews

‘‘Parallel Encounters is an exciting addition to recent critical work that will not stop at the border! The sustained attention to the Canada–US border in this great collection contributes to crucial disciplinary shifts that now revise national fields in North American, hemispheric, and other transnational contexts. Parallel Encounters reads fashion, television, health, and national security across the border, offers an excellent section on indigenous cultures, and gives us exceptional essays on key texts and poetics. This volume is invaluable for any reader interested in the politics and poetics of the border.''

Winfried Siemerling

‘‘Parallel Encounters focuses on cultural productions about Canada and its relationship to the border with the United States and thus draws much-needed attention to a geography that has remained under-examined in hemispheric American and border studies. A wake-up call to fields that have largely remained grounded in US research traditions and perspectives, the collection is the first to bring together the work of scholars working primarily in Canada and the United Kingdom on issues of indigeneity and slavery in the Canadian context, and on a variety of media forms.''

Claudia Sadowski-Smith